Some suggested designs for the Millennium Dome D owning Street announced the forma- tion of an 'action group' of civil servants who will meet at the Foreign Office to deal with...

The Spectator, 56 Doughty Street, London WC1N 2LL Telephone: 0171-405 1706; Telex 27124; Fax 0171-242 0603 WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE DOME O ur cover last week, depicting the...

A faraway island of which we know nothing is a guide to events at home BRUCE ANDERSON M ontserrat is a faraway island of which we know nothing. Yet it may now have entered the...

A week's exposure to the unnatural stimulation of the Edinburgh Festival being a serious risk to one's mental stability, we make for the hills. The drive through the Trossachs...

James Delingpole on the children's television show in which adults see drugs, Hitler, religious ritual and a gay icon IN a grass-covered underground bunker, a smiling foetus...

LET US start with a puzzle. The distin- guished publisher Tom Hartman has written in piteous tones to ask the meaning of a phrase he found in Lord David Cecil's life of William...

YOU'RE NICKED Roger Rosewell on the growing tendency of the police to charge those in the public eye READING UNIVERSITY professor John Cottingham was lucky. Last month a jury...

Stephen Glover unravels the case of the Guardian journalist with Libyan money in her bank account THROUGHOUT the recent skirmishes between my colleague Paul Johnson and Man...

Michael Heath

Brian Masters reveals hitherto unpublicised clues suggesting that French country people are shielding Caroline Dickinson's killer THE MURDER of Caroline Dickinson in the early...

How to save yourself 51 trips to the library . . . or over £41 on The Spectator If you're forced to share The Spectator with fellow students, then you'll know how difficult it...

Lighting a Wordsworthian candle in a dim and philistine world PAUL JOHNSON C hris Smith, Secretary of State for Cul- ture, Media and Sport, said last week that the book he...

NOW THAT the French have given up on the ten-franc kir, I suppose that I must fol- low their example. This will placate those readers who have patiently explained to me that...

SCOTCH in one airport bag, socks in another, I reach the departure gate, where a bizarre sight awaits me. Has my aircraft been camouflaged, or has it been painted in British...

FIRST the good news: British Telecom has won itself a £3 billion discount on its excit- ing new purchase in America. Clearing the deal with the regulators took so long that BT...

I LIKE the notion of celebrating the mil- lennium on the Heights of Abraham. They are (of course) near Matlock, and the plan is to make them 250 feet higher. A tower with a...

Poor, nasty, brutish and not even solitary it's a dog's life for Theo CHRISTOPHER FILDES A finance minister's life, said Ronnie de Mel of Sri Lanka, who tried it, is poor,...

THE FIRST Mr Smith had a really good business idea. In 1828, so he noticed, The Spectator was refounded. The London & Birmingham Railway followed nine years later. Put the two...

of the Church of England, echoes the words written in 1832 by Arnold of Rugby: `The church as it now stands, no human power can save.' Only a year after that, the Oxford...

also failed to generate the political capital which Peter Mandel- son's great-grandfather and colleagues had hoped would result. The 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition on the...

Sir: Sion Simon's fly-on-the-Cabinet-wall exposé of the millennium dome saga (`How New Labour was made to love the dome', 23 August) rests on a false premise which only appears...

Sir: It was in fact my father, R.H.C. Steed, then Sefton Delmer's Berlin assistant, who telephoned the news of the Reichstag fire to the Daily Express office in London (Media...

Sir: John Gummer (Divorced from reality', 23 August) writes with all the fervour of a recent convert. The young American woman unfortunately married into the Kennedy dynasty...

Sir: When my old friend Paul Gane (Let- ters, 16 August) and I were members of Harry Hanson's Court Players at the White Rock Pavilion, St Leonards-on-Sea, Hast- ings, I was...

Sir: Simon Blow (Packages of misery', 23 August) regrets the age of mass tourism, but his own youthful expedition to Tunisia to stay in the villa of wealthy Europeans was an...

Humanity and markets Samuel Brittan BRINGING THE MARKET BACK IN by John L. Kelley Macmillan Press, £45, pp. 270 WELFARE AND VALUES edited by P. Askonas and S. Frowen...

Main de Botton SURFING THE ZEITGEIST by Gilbert Adair Faber, £9.99, pp. 272 F ora the outside, this promises to be a very hip book, a celebration of youthful culture sure to...

D. J. Enright THE MERRY HEART by Robertson Davies Viking, £20, pp. 385 T he Merry Heart — something that `doeth good like a medicine' (Proverbs) — is a collection of pieces by...

Neville Chamberlain Neither brought peace in his time. James Michie

William Scammell THE BOY IN THE MOON by Kate O'Riordan Flamingo, £12.99, pp. K ate O'Riordan's second novel opens with the rather too symbolic sight of four- year-old Sam...

P. J. Kavanagh W.G. by Robert Low Richard Cohen Books, £18.99, pp. 312 N othing changes: England's cricketing relations with Australia began as they intended to go on. In only...

Anita Brookner ENDURING LOVE by Ian McEwan Cape, £15.99, pp. 247 D e Clerambault's syndrome, named after the French psychiatrist who first isolated and identified it in 1942,...

SUBSCRIBE TODAY SUBSCRIPTION RATES 1 Year 6 months UK £93 £47 Europe £104 £52 USA (2nd class) $151 $76 USA (1st class) $175 $88 Rest of World (2nd) £107 £54 Rest of World...

Rupert Christiansen VIRGIN ISLANDS: ESSAYS, 1992-1997 by Gore Vidal Deutsch, £17.99, pp. 320 S ome years ago, a ridiculously handsome young photographer friend of mine told me...

Jonathan Clark MAPS AND HISTORY by Jeremy Black Yale, £25, pp. 267 H istory is about chaps; geography is about maps.' In the days when England was run by self-important old men...

Montagu Curzon TUMULT IN THE CLOUDS: THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE OF THE WAR IN THE AIR, 1914-1918 by Nigel Steel and Peter Hart Hodder, £20, pp. 352 ne tries the usual defences: it...

Standing the test of time Michael Tanner believes that repeated scrutiny of the classics ensures their survival E veryone agrees that there is some- thing called the test of...

Stephen Cox (Dulwich Picture Gallery, till 28 Sept) Uneasy affinity John Spurling I n spite of its outstanding collection of Old Masters and its handsome yellow-brick...

Good, bad and drab Robin Holloway A halfway round-up of such Proms as I've been able to catch from an intelligent, well-balanced season deftly framing diversi- ty within...

Martin Vander Weyer explains how a theatre was built on the edge of the North York Moors I n 1992 we decided to spend £5,000 on a feasibility study for what is now our thriv-...

Austin Powers (15, selected cinemas) Freeze frame Mark Steyn A ustin Powers, International Man of Mystery is the best British film in years. Unfortunately, it's not exactly...

Lies, damned lies . . . Michael Vestey W henever I reported on politics for the BBC I always liked to think that politi- cians were intrinsically decent people who in order to...

The Seagull (Donmar Warehouse) An Ideal Husband (Theatre Royal, Haymarket) Choosing Chekhov Sheridan Morley M ore than one Seagull is flying around London this late summer:...

Mumbo- Simon Hoggart I t's been a bad week for the paranormal on television, I'm pleased to say. Dreadful programmes such as Beyond Belief — char- latans claiming superhuman...

Prove me wrong Alan Judd T he new Range Rover arrives today. It's not mine, unfortunately, but belongs to the manufacturer and is on loan for a week's test. In this execrably...

A perfect gent Robin Oakley The Racing Post said ungenerously, `3,500 (Irish) gns foal from a stable hardly associated with first-time out winners.' `This first outing will...

The end of elegance Taki Gstaad H istory makes clear that societies which embrace casual dress policies do not fare well. The downfall of many civilisa- tions was due not to...

Local Hero Leanda de Lisle M y husband Peter has always loved dogs, but he hadn't had one of his own until, on his 24th birthday my in-laws pre- sented him with a black...

Delaying tactics Andrew Robson A n experienced declarer loses his cer- tain losers early in the hand and delays broaching suits in which he has decisions to make until as late...

my generation, ate was Indian, not in my home town — for Indian restaurants started to proliferate after the early 1950s — but when I went away to the university. Chinese...

IF J ,C.I.t .41.1S(0i041.,,, .. COMPETITION 6 SISGIF 1110 , ,I, .11. 1 ISLE OF Art with a capital F J aspistos IN COMPETITION NO. 1997 you were shown a reproduction of a...

IN•THE-STRAND CHESS .v' 4NI SIMPSON'S IN-THE-STRAND New talent Raymond Keene THE MIND Sports Olympiad, which fin- ished last week, attracted a host of world champions and...

You are invited to report, as an eye- witness, three startling events or incidents which might suitably or unsuitably occur in the Year of the Millennium. Maximum 150 words....

A first prize of £30 and a bottle of Graham's Late Bottled Vintage 1991 Port for the first correct solution opened on 15 September with two runners-up prizes of £20 (or, for UK...

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Singular men Simon Barnes ONE of the odd things about team sports is the extraordinary attraction they hold for people who seem utterly unsuited to them. Goalkeepers, for a...

Q. My niece is employed as a nanny by a well-known media couple who are ostenta- tiously New Labour. They are forever writing about their working-class origins, and one would...